A Type Cop on duty, salute!

Héctor

Slow news day, I guess. :-)

Funny thing about it: I got an email this morning from the art director of Good Night, And Good Luck who insisted that they did not use Helvetica in the film, contrary to what was claimed in the article (more here). If this is true, then it is unfortunate that they chose to pick on this particular film in the article's lead. It could be a serious blow to the whole cause. I may be forced to resign my position in Designers Against Anachronistic Film Typography (DAAFT).

Mark's great eye for detail probably gets him kicked out of his local cineplex a lot.

Theater Manager: I warned you Mr. Simonson, the next time you yell, 'Lucian Bernhard wasn't born until 20 years AFTER Gangs of New York took place!' I was booting you out!

On the contrary, I'm very discreet.

I remember Adam Twardoch going into conniptions during Enemy at the Gates because the WWII Russian propaganda leaflets were set in Arial Cyrillic.

One of Ross' and my earliest typographic jobs, when we first started Tiro, was reproducing French identity cards and vermouth bottle labels from the 1920s for a film based on the flying exploits of Antoine de Saint-Expury. If I recall correctly, we modified Franklin Gothic for the identity card type, and were able to get quite close without too much difficulty. Even if it wasn't completely accurate, it also wasn't recognisable as a specific later typeface. Fun work, and something that could become a lucrative and interesting field for many of our colleagues if the studios start paying attention to Mr Simonson. :)

Let's not forget the fiasco of the forged memos about George Bush's military service (or lack thereof) on 60 Minutes, which were supposedly from the Vietnam era and yet had superscript "th"s. They really ought have typophiles on retainer.

I'm equally annoyed by period movies with anachronistic accents, dialog, and soundtrack music.

***

The typography in Polanski's Oliver Twist is well done. I also like the way it uses Gustave Dore's engravings of 19th-century London as the basis of many of the set designs and costumes.

I remember a more recent German movie about the Nazi period. In once scene there was a van with lettering on it. Palatino.

Design Observer picked up the story too.

Here's a straight look at the type on the wall. The wider 'C' with angled terminals appears to be from Akzidenz Grotesk.

Nice detective work, Stephen!

But, the B juts out more like Helvetica as well as the middle bar on the E being longer as is Helvetica. I don't thing the terminals on the C are near as angular, and I think the shadow is playing tricks with your eyes.

... and the W is too wide in AG to be correct. ...

You're right about the W, but the S looks more like AK to me.

Here is an enhanced version of Stephen's image:

I just saw King Kong and while I agree with Mark that the typography within the movie looked very authentic, I was disappointed that they used Bodega Sans for the titles - that is such a recent font, albeit with a vintage look.

Yeah, I was disappointed by the type choices in the credits, too. But in my "spot the wrong font" hobbie, titles are exempt. Because they are part of the present, they can't be considered anachronistic. An art deco font made in the '90s for a movie set in the '30s is okay for the titles since they exist outside the context of the film's setting. Aside from that, though, they could have been much better. Bodega Sans is one thing, but Skia??? Please. At least they didn't use Trajan.

Thanks for the zoom, Mark. Still a toss-up. Here's an overlay:

W too wide in AG. E too wide in Helv. Could they have constructed custom? Something closer to Standard? Inquiring type freaks want to know!

Have you tried different versions of both (old/new) Helvetica & AG, Helveticas & AGs by other names? Just a guess.

In that era, would they not have used the American version called "Standard" in the U.S.? Hot metal only probably though.

ChrisL

But wouldn't the prop dept. (depending on the film's set or art director) go a more logical route first seeking what their own studio or CBS Studios might still have available in terms of sign props? (Free standing extruded, cast or cut letters.)

My younger son works in L.A. at an antique store that specializes in architectural hardware from European gothic cathedral door hinges, to brass spitoons from the 1920s. He says many of the set and prop workers in Hollywood hunt for period style fixtures, door knobs, ceiling fans, etc., then bring them back to the prop dept. workshop to make knock-offs for the various sets.

My point being that the responsibility for making/finding letters for "CBS NEWS" might have gone to through the "property master" to the prop dept instead of through the art director to the art dept.

Instead of creating all the letters from scratch, the prop people might have gone the research route and found only a few existing sign letters, mistakenly identified what they had as Helvetica, thus constructed any missing characters as Helvetica???

Besides, we know that both signage manufacturers and sign makers deal in a different scale than graphics people. If type designers prior to phototypesetting frequently modified character design for scaling of titling weights, wouldn't even skilled sign crafters consider subtle modifications for characters ranging from 12 inches to 20 feet tall? I think so.

They might have projected it with a Lucey and cut it by hand nomatter what the source. Doing things by hand was the norm then, not the exception.

ChrisL

I totally missed this: My cousin Robert wrote a piece about "Dog Meets God" that appears on the same page as the story we've been discussing. He's a theater critic in New York and writes for them sometimes. Small world.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/01/theater/01simonson.html

They might have projected it with a Lucey

'Splain dis to me, Lucy!

Which if I recall was based on the ability of the old large format camera to display a scalable image if well illuminated.

I can't find an actual pic of a "Lucey" tracing machine, but the one we used had a curtain you could pull around like the old voting machines and old cranks for scaling and focusing the image onto a horizontal tracing table.

Gimme one of those!

LUCIGRAPH from Sam Weiss, who used it to create many of the award winning films on Nick Bosustow, being offered for $250. The buyer will need a small truck to pick it up.

I remember Lucey's i use to use one to make comps. Didn't they run on two sticks being rubbed together?

There was an article in the paper today about the gaffs in the film King Kong. One notable one was an interaction between Kong and his girl friend. It seems every time the camera was on Kong in NYC he was surrounded by snow and every time it was on her there was no snow. Another one is when Kong goes down a Manhattan street destroying cars and everything else and when the girl friend follows down the same street the cars are perfectly parked with no damage.

> It seems every time the camera was on Kong in NYC he was surrounded by snow and every time it was on her there was no snow.

Global warming

Maybe Kong had bad breathe and melted the snow

Maybe "She" was hot and "He" was not?
Enough monkey shines for one day :-)

ChrisL

If ever I would mention "Lucey" at the office, everyone would be thinking about Lucy Liu. It must be a generation thing. Glad Norbert and Dan at least can be counted on to remember old school tools :-)

ChrisL

Norbert, I hear they are doing a digital version of the Lucey called the "MacGillicuddy" :-)

Not to mention that she was in a sleeveless negligee during the entire wintry NY snow scene and didn't shiver at all, no goosebumps, no steam in her breath.

Other than that, the movie was perfectly believable.

I watched the new King Kong movie shortly after watching the 1933 original on the recently released DVD. It was fun to see them back to back because the new one follows the original store very closely and includes many references to it. The titles on the new version--the ones with Bodega Sans--were similar to the original, but could have been better. In fact, in all the extras on the DVD of the original, they did a really good job of aping (ha!) the original titles, even creating a font to match the lettering. The titles in the new Kong look "inspired by" while the DVD's look astonishingly like the real thing, down to scratches and frame jitters.

The "one other thing" I noticed that's mentioned at the end of the article was Bodega Sans used for dimensional letters above a marquee on a theater. It's a fleeting image and I missed it the second time I saw it. It may well have been my imagination. There was one more thing (which Scott Stowell mentioned on Design Observer and I had forgotten about): During the opening scenes depicting the Great Depression, there is a down-on-his-luck guy sitting in front of a box labeled in large letters set in Optima. Aside from those few things, I thought they did a great job on signs and such. I noticed there were three sign painters listed in the credits. Nice.

Bodega Sans is one thing, but Skia???

My girlfriend and I practically had a conniption in the movie theatre when the titles rolled. SKIA?!!!! Being a graphic designer and having gone to school for TV and Film production sometimes ruins my viewing experience. Sometimes you just gotta shut the switch off and enjoy.

Upon leaving the theatre, and being asked "What did you think?". I replied "I think I saw Optima and Friz Quadrata... totally inappropriate for the time period." My wife rolled her eyes, my friends laughed, then asked "What?"

The Optima siting was mentioned above. I swear I saw some Friz on building signage behind Kong, on the streets of New York, near the end of the movie. There were some great (appropriate) neon signs above it, and then BANG... Friz Quadrata.

Oh well, I like being a "subset of a subset of a subset of society."

There are now enough critiques of ahistorical type in movies (several by me, many more by other writers) that I’ve started using Simonson's original page title, Typecasting, as a tag on delicious, viz. http://del.icio.us/tag/typecasting

As you find ’em, tag ’em.

--
Joe Clark
http://joeclark.org/

This is the thread that proves beyond doubt
that we are full-fledged, category-A geeks.
Bravo! :-)

> In once scene there was a van with lettering on it. Palatino.

Well, at least Zapf did serve... ;-)

hhp

The leaflets in "Enemy at the Gates" that John mentioned were printed in ITC Bookman Cyrillic (the Cyrillic version was done in 1993 by Lyubov Kuznetsova and Tagir Safayev at ParaType), and the letters were electronically compressed! That really was appaling :)

What John didn’t mention was that, when we left the cinema, both Ross and John looked at me as if I were insane. "When we’re watching a movie, we’re watching a movie," said John.

A.

Curse of Helvetica stalks art director...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/24/AR200602...

"Oh, and about those reports of non-period set issues? Not so. The bottled spring water was only in the publicity still, not the film; the Helvetica on the CBS News logo on the film's set was actually the pre-Helvetica font Akzidenz-Grotesk."

Hey, cool--I wondered how they did that elevator trick.